Games Turning 40,20, 30 and 10 in 2016

With each year that passes, we take a look at games celebrating a certain anniversary via a post. This year however, I decided to go the video route and make these long videos covering arcade history showing games that are turning 40, 30, 20 and 10 years old in 2016 respectively. It was a lot more work to shoot and edit these videos then a post so it is a little bit of a relief to have them all finished. I might do it a little differently next year, still using videos but perhaps without all of the commentary and instead more of a quick montage. I do not cover every single title that was released in these years as that would require much longer videos, so the focus is more on titles that people know or did something different. Let me know your thoughts on the format – in the meantime, here are the four videos. Thanks for watching!

40 years: Games from 1976, which is the year that I personally consider “The Golden Age” to have started since you had the first real wave of CPU-based games come along, which allowed titles to become more elaborate and detailed than before. You could say that they ‘broke out’ from the molds 😛

30 years: 1986 was an interesting year for the arcade since it was doing some bounceback from the 1983 crash. This really showed the dominance of Japanese-made games on the video game landscape.

20 years: 1996 was the year where the fighting game was now an established figure on the arcade scene but the hype had fizzled out a little bit to give room to other game genres. Many of the games that came along during this time would setup the market for how it is today, moving the focus away from joystick titles to a shift on guns and steering wheels.

10 years: It isn’t talked about often at all but there was another market crash around the turn of the century, which gave us the common meme of “arcades are dead”. This video shows that 10 years ago was a time where things recovered, setting us up for now. It is also interesting to note how 20 years after 1986 that Japanese companies would be leading the pack, particularly Sega.